There's a scene in a Hungarian film from the 1970s (I can't remember the title) in which a chronically depressed man goes to his doctor. The doctor makes the conventional suggestions: plenty of rest, a healthy diet, exercise, fresh air. "That should sort you. But above all," he warns, "don't watch any Hungarian films."

Outside their country, Hungarian directors have had, from the critics at least, a friendly reception. My guess is this is partly due to the "Martian" factor (showing an utterly different world) and partly to an inverse snobbery (Iranian films reap the same indulgence now, almost entirely on the basis that they're not Hollywood).

The season of films showing at the Barbican in London this week is in many ways a very representative selection of Hungarian cinema under communism. I could easily have chosen another set of six films on the subject of the 1950s or the 1956 revolution, but after that I would have struggled to pick any worthwhile films - because there aren't any.

Two titles crop up again and again when you ask Hungarians what their favourite film is. One is The Witness, a comedy made in 1969 by Peter Bacso; a satire on the Stalinist era so telling that even though it had been commissioned by the communist Maecenas, Gyorgy Aczel, it sat on a shelf for 10 years. Rather like the best Monty Python sketches, its dialogue has permeated everyday life, and a leading political journal, the Hungarian Orange, is named after one of its gags. Without question, it's my favourite Hungarian film.

The other is Szindbád, made in 1971 by Zoltán Huszárik. While The Witness is a film that can be enjoyed by anyone without the slightest knowledge of Hungary, Szindbád seems to be a film that requires you to have been born and raised Hungarian. Based on the stories of Gyula Krúdy, Szindbád (as in Sinbad the sailor) is a fin-de-siècle shagaholic writer and restaurant addict (as was Krúdy). Both Krúdy's writing and Huszárik's film arouse fanatical ardour in Hungarians, although Szindbád's escapades were too whimsical and sentimental for me.

But what The Witness and Szindbád have in common is that they are untypical of Hungarian films post-1945. Szindbád's popularity is largely explicable by its sweetness: it harks back to the romance of the Austro-Hungarian empire, when the Hungarians were at their best, women wore splendid dresses and the dining was fine. The Witness stands out because it's entertaining and funny. Humour was in short supply in the communist era.

Hollywood was created by Hungarians (Hungarians will tell you). And it's true their presence was formidable. Twentieth Century Fox was in fact Wilhelm Fuchs, born in Tolcsva, Hungary. Paramount studios was founded by Adolph Zukor (who famously had a sign that read "To be Hungarian is not enough" on the wall). Casablanca - directed by Michael Curtiz. Original Dracula? Béla Lugosi. British cinema was invigorated by the Korda family. And Hungary in the 1930s had a flourishing film business.

The second world war changed all that. Hungary took a real pounding. The Nazis. The Holocaust. The Russians. The communists. After the war, only one decent feature film was made, Somewhere in Europe (by Geza Radvanyi, brother of the novelist Sándor Marai and, as he was, forced to emigrate). Then comes a 40-year cloud of propaganda and gloom.

When I think of Hungarian films I think of despair and bleakness, and what's more, despair and bleakness of indefensible duration. The pontifex maximus of joylessness and snailing camerawork is Béla Tarr, who is regularly lauded outside of Hungary; yet as someone who spends too much time in the DVD shops of Budapest, I have never seen one of his films on sale there. When Tarr starts a pan, you know you have time to go out of the auditorium: you can have a piss, eat a hotdog, do the lottery, make a phone call, and when you go back in, the pan won't have finished. His best-known films are based on the novels of László Krasznahorkai, author of The Melancholy of Resistance.

But in Hungarian cinema, resistance is futile. Melancholy is irresistible. Hungary has always had a world-class suicide rate. Love (1971), directed by Karoly Makk, is one of the most depressing films I've ever seen. It is arguably the best made of the Barbican season - great performances, crisp dialogue. But it's about an old, bed-ridden woman dying slowly, very slowly.

Twenty Hours (1965) isn't the length of Zoltán Fábri's film, but it certainly feels like it. A journalist visits a village to unearth what happened there in 1956. It's a film that came straight from the propaganda department of the Kádár regime that crushed the revolution, and another for fans of stasis.

Highly regarded in the 1960s and 1970s and still on the syllabus of many a film course, Miklós Jancsó is a director whose filmographies tend to omit his Leni Riefenstahl-like endorsement of totalitarianism in the early 1950s. Much of his art house success was down to his liberal use of the bare breasts and buttocks of young actresses, but he does have talent.

The Round-Up (1965) is set in a prison camp in the aftermath of the 1848 revolution. This is a truly odd film, which at times sounds as if it were written by Beckett. Though I'm familiar with the historical background, I had trouble following it, and even now I'm unable to figure out what it was about.

In one way it's a surprise to see newsreel footage of the revolution in István Szabó's Father (1966) so soon after the event. But, as one senior communist news editor once explained to me, there were no forbidden subjects in Hungary, only forbidden opinions. The line, as expounded in Fábri's film, is that the party had made errors in the 1950s, that the workers and peasants had genuine grievances which led to unrest that was then blown into counter-revolution by fascists, the CIA, bishops, spivs, foreigners, footpads, apple-scrumpers, etc.

Szabó's film centres on a boy, Tako, whose father dies when he is very young. For anyone unfamiliar with Hungarian history, many of the twists will be impossible to follow. For example, during the revolution, Tako takes his father's watch to be repaired. When he returns to the watchmaker's, he finds the premises boarded up. According to the subtitles, a neighbour states that the watchmaker has "gone". What she actually says is that the watchmaker has "gone to the countryside", which was code for those who chose to leave Hungary by walking into Austria (as 200,000 Hungarians did).

Father suffers from interminable monologues and some not-so-masterful direction, but Szabó does create one outstanding sequence. Tako and some of his friends work as extras on a film about the Jewish deportations to the death camps. Kitted out with yellow stars, they are marching across Budapest's Chain Bridge when the director insists that Tako has the right face to switch positions and become one of the Nazi guards; it's a clever demonstration of how arbitrary the allocation of roles can be. This moment is all the more piquant when one bears in mind that Szabó worked as an informer for III/III, the internal security service. Of course, swapping roles as an extra isn't the same as writing reports on your friends and colleagues.

The last film of the communist era, Eldorado (1988), was directed by Géza Bereményi, who was born in 1946 and so wasn't presented with the Faustian choices that Jancsó, Szabó and Fábri faced. Bereményi wrote another of my favourite films, Time Stands Still, a sort of American Graffiti without the laughs, which opens with the crushing of the revolution. He returns to the theme in Eldorado and is, as far as I know, the first director to re-create the street-fighting.

The scene is, unfortunately, unconvincing. A young woman runs up to a Russian tank and throws a Molotov cocktail at its tracks. The driver then scrambles out and is gunned down. Having talked to many people who did fight Soviet armour, I can assure you of the following: you didn't run up to tanks, because they would shoot you. Molotovs were only effective against the old T-34s, and you didn't throw them at the tracks, you aimed for the ventilation grilles and prayed that the burning petrol would get sucked in and the tank would "brew up". Against Bereményi's T-54, petrol bombs were as useful as custard pies.

The Hungarian film world was long dominated by Stalinists, snitches, crawlers and bores - so, all in all, not that different from Hollywood, the difference being that the Hungarians formed a cartel. Hungarian film-goers had to go and see what Hungarian film-makers made. Many films in the new, cartel-free era have fed off the revolution, but - probably out of budgetary considerations - none has tackled the subject head-on.

The 50th anniversary, however, has prompted a spate of films seeking to be the definitive 1956 film. The styles range from Liberté '56, a film version of a musical (yet to be staged) directed by Attila Vidnyánszky, which treats the revolution in a Peter Brook/Marat-Sade fashion: colourful and mannered (performers wear tank costumes). Mansfeld is the opposite: the story of a freedom fighter who was kept in jail until his 18th birthday when he could be executed (unsurprisingly grim).

But the heavyweight offering comes from Andrew Vajna, producer of such box-office blockbusters as Rambo and Total Recall. Vajna left Hungary after the revolution at the age of 12, eventually landing up in Hollywood smoking cigars with Arnie. He wanted to make a film about the event "which gave me the chance to be what I am". The original script was written by another Magyar by birth, Joe Eszterhas of Basic Instinct fame. It's based on the exploits of the Hungarian water-polo team, which is also the subject of the one documentary at the Barbican, Freedom's Fury. You don't see many documentaries that have Lucy Liu, Quentin Tarantino and Andrew Vajna as executive producers, and its account of the ultimate grudge match between Hungary and the Soviet Union at the Melbourne Olympics in the wake of the Red Army's suppression of the revolution is gripping (although there are factual slip-ups in the commentary).

Vajna has given the essentials of Freedom's Fury the full Hollywood treatment (and has already endured criticism in Hungary for it). Freedom, Love (it has a better, alliterative ring in Hungarian, Szabadság, Szerelem) has been directed by Krisztina Goda, who trained at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield and whose first feature, Just Sex - Nothing Else, was probably the first decent romantic comedy made in Hungary since the second world war.

The film will be premiered in Budapest on October 25. I have only been able to watch half a dozen sequences from it, so whether it will stand up as a whole or not, I can't say. But what cannot be disputed is that this is the first film to do some visual justice to what happened in the streets of Budapest, when kids and workers took on the Soviet army and fought them to a standstill (for a while). I have to admit I choked up.